Mario Furloni

Mario Furloni is an award-winning Brazilian documentary and narrative filmmaker and cinematographer based in Oakland, CA.

He is the cinematographer and co-producer of the critically-acclaimed documentary The Return, which chronicles the end of California’s three strikes law through the eyes of former lifers. The Return won the Audience Award at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival, and the Golden Gate Award at the 2016 San Francisco International Film Festival. It was the series opening film shown on PBS POV this year.

Mario has directed a number of short documentary and fiction projects, including Pot Country, as well as a forthcoming film about one man’s surprising experiment to change himself by swapping out the bacteria in his body with someone else's, and the Brazilian short fiction film Tem Alguém Feliz em Algum Lugar /Someone is Happy Somewhere (which screened domestically at San Francisco International Film Festival and AspenShorts Film Festival). He also co-wrote the script for that short.

Mario shot the short documentary After My Garden Grows, by Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Megan Mylan, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2014. He was awarded a Kenneth Ranin Foundation screenwriting grant (previous winners include Fruitvale Station and Short Term 12) and a residency with the San Francisco Film Society. He has a master’s degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.